You know what? I’ve been sitting on this since the game came out. Now as you may have heard, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor can look “amazing” with Ray Tracing. Or at least that’s what some people want to make you believe. The reality is that the Ray Tracing implementation in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is not that good. In fact, the game can look atrocious with Ray Tracing, and we highly recommend disabling it.
Before continuing, for our tests, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 531.68 driver. For those wondering, the gameplay footage of this video is from the game’s latest version (with its latest patch applied).
Ray Tracing in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor adds RTAO, RTGI on specific objects, and very few RT Reflections. The problem here, however, is that the radius of the RTAO is really short. As such, with RT On, you’ll get AWFUL visual changes while exploring the environments.
In the following video, we highlight these visual issues. As you can see, shadows can form right in front of you, completely changing the way things look. This happens when approaching objects, and when you’re getting away from them. As a result of that, there isn’t any visual consistency in this game with RT On. And yes, these visual issues are not present when you disable Ray Tracing.
Now I seriously can’t believe anyone likes these constant visual issues that RTAO brings to the table. Okay okay, you might like them if you have myopia or something. These issues are as bad as the RT Shadows that could form right in front of you in The Witcher 3 Next-Gen. What’s also surprising is the fact that no one has commented on them. Does everyone have eyesight issues? How on Earth would you say that RT makes a world of difference in this game when you have constant visual issues right in front of you? Because, as you can clearly see in the video, you can immediately notice these shadow changes in real-time (we don’t have to zoom in, or play the video frame-by-frame. They are THAT obvious). And unlike the SSR reflections which only look bad on water, the RTAO issues occur constantly, throughout the entire game.
So yes, while in still images Ray Tracing may look good, in motion things simply fall apart. And, in my opinion, visual consistency is more important than standing still and looking at the environments. If people are fine with these atrocious visual changes that can occur right in front of them, they have no right at all criticizing things like DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Because I can’t honestly believe they can “feel” or spot the artifacts of those “fake frames” when they can’t see what’s happening right in front of them.
The best solution would have been to have different settings for the game’s RT effects. Respawn should have allowed players to enable/disable RTGI, RTAO and RT Reflections. If we had that, we could get the best of both worlds by only keeping RTGI and RT Reflections (until they could fix these RTAO issues).
Therefore, we suggest disabling Ray Tracing in order to get a more consistent visual experience. After all, the game already has major pop-in issues. So no, you don’t need more pop-ins due to this mediocre RT implementation. And lastly, we don’t know whether, and if, Respawn will address this issue or whether it will provide separate settings for the game’s RT effects!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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“wake me up when Ray Tracing works”.
Yikes! Worse performance, added stutters, and now visual artifacts. RT is trash in this game as is most of the game on a technical level.
It always does. Botches performance too
Brutal. I got this free with my new processor. Gonna wait 4-6 months to play it though. So goes pc gaming.
Now you know why they bundled it with a new CPU. It literally can’t run well on any other old CPU, no matter how strong your GPU is.
It can”t run well on theze new cpu either lol
It kinda does much better on these than on any older one, especially on the 3D Cache ones.
well i have a 7950x3D and it’s still a stutter and GPU underfed because of the cpu management mess, i can'”t imagine with the other ones
If you bought a PC to play AAA games, you’re doing it wrong.
It doesn’t even make sense to not have shadows baked if there isn’t dynamic light sources in the scene.
You do know ray tracing brings additional stuttering because its not precompiled.
But raytracing was “easy for developers”, and “the future”.
lol
Raytracing has artefacts, glitches, it uses a ton of memory and tanks performance.
Simply baking in the shadows into the asset like every other game does, would have solved all these issues.
But these titles are sponsored by GPU makers, AMD this time, and they pay these developers to add tons of crap to entice players to buy their overpriced “raytracing” GPU that frankly suck.
Meanwhile, with ray tracing disabled, Cal’s hair constantly goes from looking relatively normal to glowing brightly red, like someone dunked his head in a smelter. It’s not just the ray tracing that’s broken, it’s the entire game.
Also, you should really be restarting the game between changes. There is a known bug in the PC version where settings don’t always apply correctly and some performance can be lost after changing settings until you relaunch the game.
RTGI using reshade would probably look much better at a similar perf. cost.
Seems like you’re nitpicking one area in the game. It doesn’t happen everywhere. I play with RT and I’m definitely not encountering it often enough to notice. The benefits that RT brings outweigh the negatives.
No, don’t disable it. It’s cutting edge tech that you need to have on at all times because it’s perfect. Besides why else would anyone buy a Fuqin 4090 if you can’t crack up everything to ultra@500 fps. Oh wait, ya FUQIN CAN’T! ???
But raytracing was “easy for developers”. lol
Raytracing has artefacts, glitches, it uses a ton of memory and tanks performance.
Simply baking in the shadows into a light map during development, something every other developer does for these unmovable objects, solves all these issues.
But these titles are sponsored by GPU makers, AMD this time, and they pay these developers to add tons of crap to entice players to buy their overpriced “raytracing” GPU that frankly suck.
More bad news about this turd game.
People don’t buy this mess of a game until it gets fixed (if ever).
“And, in my opinion, visual consistency is more important than standing still and looking at the environments. If people are fine with these atrocious visual changes that can occur right in front of them, they have no right at all criticizing things like DLSS 3 Frame Generation.”
Spot on.
It’s not like I’d play the game with the raytracing on to begin with. I enjoy high FPS gameplay, and not a raytraced slideshow…
Something like the RTX4080 is capable of running just about any RT game at 1440p and well in excess of 60 fps (especially with DLSS 2 and FG), so you can play with the best graphics, but also at a good frame rate. More fps will only benefit competitive gamers (more fps = less input lag).
Display technology is more important than framerate. On my VT30 plasma I get BETTER motion quality at 60Hz than 170Hz on my LCD. In order to match motion quality on my 60Hz VT30 plasma you need 240Hz LCD. What’s more CRT’s are even more impressive, because you need 1000Hz LCD to match motion clarity on 60Hz CRT.
Only the OLED with BFI has equally good motion clarity at 60Hz, but unfortunately the brightness is cut in half with BFI, so you need very bright OLED (with MLA technology).
Ah yes, because I want ghosting and downsampled graphics just to make the game playable…
As for display tech, LCD panels are cheap by comparison to anything with good image persistence. Anything beyond an IPS panel was unaffordable to me, doubly so considering the potential for burn-in.
BTW: Part of the reason for wanting higher FPS is game responsiveness. Even an RPG will feel more responsive at FPS above 100 than it does at 60, which means a better gaming experience. Hell, even scrolling around the map in an RTS is going to feel more responsive at higher FPS, just like the UI on your phone feels more responsive at higher FPS/refresh rates (mine is at 144 Hz).
DLSS 3 means you’re not actually playing at 1440p60 though.
I’m not a DLSS 3 hater necessarily but it in no way turns 30fps into 60fps. It’s more of a visual upgrade once you have solid base performance.
Ray tracing is bad and extremely limited in all AMD sponsored titles. Because they have limited hardware acceleration and obviously aren’t going to sponsor a game that drops down to 9 FPS at 4K like Cyberpunk. AMD literally paying to ruin PC gaming instead of the game having proper ray tracing as an option that your can enable based on your resolution and graphics card, including future cards by AMD themselves.
Yep pretty much any AMD sponsored title is going to get the bare minimum RT implementation. All we can hope is modders can improve the RT that they have included by removing the limitations, similar to what was done with Hogwarts.
Although top priority now is performance and better cpu and gpu utilization.
The 7900 has the RT power of a 3080. It’s not THAT far behind anymore. Also consoles exist and RT modes are usually made with consoles in mind now too.
Bu konu hakk?nda bilgi vermeniz çok güzel. Genellikle türkçe içerikler az oluyor fakat böyle güzel içerikler görmek ve okumak çok zevkli.
Hocam Ellerinize Sagl?k Güzel Makale Olmu? Detayl?
I take the reference to the “phenomena” of DF, the ones that are always fantastic when a little bit of RT is on the console. Impressive, they say, and maybe it’s misleading…
I still agree with you, John.
Ray Tracing can be phenomenal when implemented properly. Metro: Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, CONTROL and Dying Light 2 are great examples. The problem is that most developers don’t take full advantage of them, and only use them for RT Reflections or RT Shadows that look underwhelming. And then you have implementations that look awful due to the visual changes that can occur right in front of you (like in this game and in The Witcher 3 Next-Gen with its RT Shadows).
RTGI and RTAO usually look different rather than clearly better in my experience. I kind of prefer the idea of an artist designing a scene, and when you take that out you get weird stuff like rooms that are way too dark (realistic sure, better? Not really).
Maybe when it’s not a bolt on and games are truly designed around it I’ll like it more, but as of today reflections are actually my favorite RT just because they remove the awful SSR downsides.
I was talking about consoles, where CP-2077 twists his thumbs, more or less like DL-2. On the other hand, I can’t stand the noisy RT, and in the reflections it is often the same on PC, or you have to mod to achieve decency. Control is a good example of deafening noise…
There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you made
I didn’t think it had RTAO and RTGI. I guess that says enough.
Geh tracing is a scam!
Only those who bought a card for the price of an A10 Warthog can’t see that this shlt is here just to make console peasants continue to get 25fps.
Disable the pauper FSR and everything will be fine
I like the rtx in this game. Even with it off the game lags nearly just as much for me. I think it looks like a good upgrade with it on over the previous game.
The game uses RT on its 60FPS mode in consoles. I guess to achieve this, they added the “lightest” RT they could.
Also it is an AMD sponsored title, with heavy RT it would perform pourly on Radeon cards, so they had to tone it down as much as possible.